Another misstep in CPS’ school closing boondoggle

Buried beneath the news of Chicago Public Schools’ dismal Illinois Standard Achievement Test scoreslast week was another bombshell: students from receiving schools – those schools that students from closed schools will attend next year – saw less than half of the gains on the ISAT as the rest of the district. In other words, thousands of displaced...

Buried beneath the news of Chicago Public Schools’ dismal Illinois Standard Achievement Test scoreslast week was another bombshell: students from receiving schools – those schools that students from closed schools will attend next year – saw less than half of the gains on the ISAT as the rest of the district.

In other words, thousands of displaced students are facing the prospect of switching to schools where student achievement is declining.

Twelve receiving schools saw their test scores drop by more than 4.8 percentage points, and five of those schools experienced a more than 10 percentage point drop. Lavizzo Elementary School experienced a 20.1 percentage point drop – the largest in the district.

This paints a bleak picture for incoming students. Research conducted by the University of Chicago’s Consortium on School Research shows that unless students from closing schools attend high-quality receiving schools, they’ll see no gains in academic achievement.

This is the latest in a long line of missteps CPS has committed since unveiling its plan to close schools late last year.

At first, CPS argued that the school closings were needed to save money, citing data that showed a cost savings of $500,000 to $800,000 per school.

When people began questioning those numbers, CPS’s story changed. Instead of being primarily about cost savings, the district claimed the school closings were being undertaken to move kids out of the poorest-performing schools in the city.

But this latest news indicates that a majority of students attending receiving schools in the fall will be attending schools that are backsliding.

CPS’s failed exercise in central planning provides further evidence that parents, not bureaucrats, should be making decisions when it comes to the education of Chicago’s children.

They would certainly do a better job than CPS, which has poorly handled this transition from the start.